Dr David Kelly

Dr Kelly was viewed as a security risk. What was Operation Mason? Why is it secret?

'I'm glad Lord Hutton cleared Tony, now the children can sleep at night' - Cherie Blair.

As Lord Hutton concluded his Whitewash, he decreed that Britain's pre-eminent microbiologist, David Kelly, killed himself in an Oxfordshire wood in July 2003 by slashing his left wrist with a blunt pruning knife after overdosing on painkillers.

According to Hutton, the scientist in the eye of the storm over the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had found his burden unendurable. Publicly outed for a taboo tête-à-tête with BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, he was scared of losing his job and nearly 60, preferring death before dishonour, he committed suicide. Garbage! Disregard the cover-up, the truth is David Kelly was assassinated by the British Security Service, MI5 for daring to speak out about Tony Blair's sexed-up dodgy dossiers which led Britain to an illegitimate war in Iraq.

Even before Lord Hutton's momentous whitewash, Mai Pederson, an American army intelligence officer and confidante of Dr Kelly insisted the scientist would never have taken his own life. She says that he hated pills, even simple headache tablets.

Pederson's doubts have been endorsed by several distinguished doctors who state that based on the evidence presented at the Whitewash, Dr Kelly cannot have died from blood loss or poisoning.

A consultant at Birmingham University had gone further. Dr Andrew Rouse told the British Medical Journal's website that a successful suicide by wrist slashing is so rare that the Office of National Statistics does not even list such an act separately as a cause of death.

The doctors have been joined by others, including intelligence officers, seeking answers to an array of disturbing questions.

The Kelly Group, a self-styled examining body has written to Oxfordshire coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, urging that a full inquest into the scientist's death be held.

'As concerned citizens, including amongst our number a specialist surgeon and diagnostic radiologist, we have closely scrutinised the testimonies given at the Hutton Inquiry,' the Group wrote to him.

'We consider that neither the police investigation nor the Hutton Inquiry has monitored with any degree of rigour that Dr Kelly took his own life.

'We contend that the possibility that Dr Kelly's death was murder dressed up as suicide has not been sufficiently explored. We believe that the death should be treated as suspicious until a full battery of evidence, including independently performed forensic evidence, has proved conclusively otherwise.'

This is no conspiracy theory. Spy News examines the evidence

MI5 moved the body

At 15:30 on Thursday, 17 July, when David Kelly left his home in the village of Southmoor to take his customary afternoon walk. Nine hours later, at 00.20, when he had failed to return home, his wife Janice telephoned Thames Valley Police to report her husband missing.

Next morning at 09:20, David Kelly's body was found by a trained search dog on Harrowdean Hill, about a mile from the scientist's home. The dog and his owner, Louise Holmes of the Thames Valley Lowland Search Team, were assisting the police in their hunt to find Dr Kelly.

With another volunteer, Paul Chapman, they had been searching the woods for over an hour when the dog started barking and alerted Louise. As she walked to the spot where the dog had first began to bark, Louise told the Hutton Whitewash she found the body with the head and shoulders resting against a tree. Chapman recollected specifically that Dr Kelly was sitting up. 'His legs in front of him. His right arm to the side of him. His left arm had a lot of blood on it and was bent back in a funny position' As she witnessed the scene, Louise stood beside the body for a couple of minutes.

Critically, neither Louise nor Chapman, a Scout master, reported seeing much blood around the body. They made no mention to the Hutton Whitewash about seeing a Sandvig garden pruning knife, a bloodied watch, or an opened Evian water bottle, which were discovered and recorded by police and paramedics when they arrived on the scene half an hour later.

The three detectives

After making her appalling discovery, Louise rang the police at Abingdon, they promised to dispatch a team of officers at once. Nothing more they could do, as Louise and Chapman headed down a path towards their car they encountered three men dressed in civvies who claimed they were 'Thames Valley detectives', making it look good, one of the men even flashed his identity card. In good faith, the volunteer searchers directed the men to the site of the body and returned to their car.

Louise Holmes and Paul Chapman state that they found Dr Kelly's body propped up against a tree. Abingdon police insist that they found the microbiologist lying flat on his back. All ensuing witnesses gave the same story.

The MI5 officers moved the body and planted the pruning knife, water bottle and watch mentioned by subsequent witnesses at the scene. At the Hutton Whitewash the bona fide Thames Valley detectives insist they did not touch Dr Kelly's body.

Not enough blood

As MI5 made crucial mistakes, central to their bungled plot is the small amount of blood found on, or near, Dr Kelly and the question of whether he could have died from his knife wounds.

Paramedic Vanessa Hunt, part of an ambulance team which spent around 15 minutes at Dr Kelly's side, told the Hutton Whitewash: 'there was a small patch on his right knee, but no obvious arterial bleeding. there was no spraying of blood or huge blood loss or any obvious loss on his clothing.'

It was this key disclosure that has so concerned British doctors, including David Halpin, former consultant in trauma at Torbay Hospital, Devon, and radiologist Dr Stephen Frost, now based in North Wales.

The doctors contacted The Kelly Group and wrote to a national newspaper. They insisted: 'To die from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood. It is unlikely from his stated injury that he would have lost more than a pint.'

Another medical expert and Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists Dr A. Peter Fletcher, added in a letter to the Press: 'Anybody who has seen five pints of blood spurted forcefully out of a severed artery will know that there is one hell of a mess.

'The two searchers who found the body did not even notice that Kelly had incised his wrist with a knife.' A fifth doctor, Professor Simon Kay, a plastic surgery consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospital, was even more forceful. He stated: 'The popular view that a slit wrist is likely to prove fatal is far wide of the mark. The natural and protective response of a divided artery is to constrict and prevent life-threatening haemorrhage.

'Ways around this might include lying in a hot bath...but certainly do not include lying in a cold field.'

In their haste to make it appear suicide, a big mistake, MI5 selected the ulnar artery, deep inside the wrist, which is hard to get at and extremely unlikely to lead to death.

 Martin Birnstingl, an eminent vascular  surgeon, insists it would be effectively impossible for Dr Kelly to die by severing the ulnar artery and he should know. Mr Birnstingl was until recently president of the Vascular Surgical Society of Great Britain and is a former consultant at Barts Hospital, London.

He told a national newspaper: 'I have never, in my experience, heard of a case where someone has died after cutting their ulnar artery. And I have seen plenty of suicides.

'The minute the blood pressure falls, after a few minutes, this artery would stop bleeding. It would spray blood about and make a mess but it would soon cease.

'Dr Kelly was in the know. He was a scientist. People normally try to slash the radial artery in their wrist, the one which is used to take a pulse. Or if they are really intent on death, they cut their artery in their groin.

'To say the least it was an extremely painful and doubtful suicide method for the former head of microbiology at the research establishment of Porton Down; a man who was a global authority on toxic substances. Another MI5 blunder, it would have been virtually impossible for the right-handed Dr Kelly to have slashed from left to right on his opposite wrist, in so doing missing the radial artery and cutting deep into the ulnar artery.

Then we must consider the little matter of the three packs of the painkiller Coproximal found in Dr Kelly's coat pocket. Dr Kelly's own doctor said he had never prescribed him Coproximal. They are alleged to have been taken by him from his arthritic wife's medical cabinet, although this was never confirmed at the Hutton Whitewash.

When Dr Kelly's body was found, all but one of the 30 tablets were missing. It led to the suggestion that the 29 tablets on their own may have been responsible for ending his life. According to the Hutton Whitewash, only a fifth of a tablet was later found, during an autopsy, in Dr Kelly's stomach. Not only that, the blood analysis of each of the drug's two components was less than a third of what would usually be found in a fatal overdose victim.

As MI5 capitalised on the scientist's mental state, as Dr Kelly set out on that last walk, although he did not have any reported mental problems, it was blatant that he was deeply unhappy, the future must have appeared bleak.

A letter from the Ministry of Defence, found unopened on Dr Kelly's desk, spoke of a potential disciplinary hearing.

Unquestionably, he would have been aware of its disagreeable contents before its arrival at his home. Yet he was a robust character. In Iraq he had interrogated Saddam's scientists with considerable zeal and was reckoned as a tough opponent.

Dr Kelly had himself forecast in jest in only February 2003 that if Iraq was attacked, 'he might be found dead in the woods'.

In Whitehall, David Kelly was viewed as a liability in the sphere of defence intelligence in which he moved. He was unwilling to sever his media links or be permanently silenced. He was viewed as a security risk. Dr Kelly had been debating book projects with Victoria Roddam, an Oxford publisher who, in an email to the scientist only a week before his death, wrote: 'I think the time is ripe now more than ever for a title which addresses the relationship Government policy and war - I'm sure you would agree?'

MI5 burgle dental surgery

Immediately the news of his suicide broke, Dr Kelly's dental records were found to be missing from his file at the local surgery.

His dentist, according to the Hutton Whitewash, reported the mystery to police after finding an unlocked window at the surgery. 

Two days later the records reappeared back in the surgery in Dr Kelly's file. Their temporary disappearance so concerned police that they ran a DNA test on Dr Kelly's body just to make sure it really was him.

Among the bundles of evidence submitted to the Hutton Whitewash is also a stirring secret document marked: 'Not for Release. Police Information Only.'

According to an audit of evidence in the public domain, the document records a tactical support operation by Thames Valley Police during what it calls a 'major incident' on July 17  and July 18 of last year when Dr Kelly was missing. It was called Operation Mason.

Thames Valley Police claim that the Operation Mason file merely details their investigation into the circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly's death.

The audit shows that Operation Mason ended at 09:30 on July 18 as the two volunteers with the search dog walked away from Dr Kelly's body to meet, by chance, the three MI5 men as they posed as detectives.

Operation Mason was said to have started: at 14:30 on July 17, exactly one hour before Dr Kelly set out on his final walk. Needless to say, the contents of the Mason file remain secret.